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B117 has now been spotted in a total of 37 countries, including the United States in Florida, California and Colorado so far. In response, many countries have issued travel restrictions on planes arriving from the UK.
How even more serious the 501Y.V2 threat from South Africa is is a question that has yet to be definitively resolved. John Bell, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, told Times Radio (an affiliate of the London Times), that B117 and 501Y.V2 have different mutations; it is not a single mutation. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the (peak virus) protein,” Bell said.
For its part, the World Health Organization (WHO) so far says that 501Y.V2 does not appear to be associated with any worse symptoms or outcomes, although the WHO continues to research the variant. According to the WHO, 501Y.V2 has been reported in four other countries.
British pundits like Bell and political administrators like Health Secretary Matt Hancock aren’t words: they say South Africa’s 501Y.V2 variant is much more problematic than the UK’s B117.
“I am extremely worried about the South African variant, and that is why we have taken the steps we have taken to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told the BBC’s Today program. “It’s a very, very important problem … and it’s even more of a problem than the new British variant.”
These variants of COVID-19 come at a time when stressed health systems are doing all they can to deal with traditional SARS-CoV-2. In the United States yesterday, 125,544 people were hospitalized with the disease, according to the COVID Tracking Project. It’s a new one-day record. The number of COVID-related hospitalizations has been over 100,000 per day for a month.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University reports that yesterday there were 210,479 new cases of COVID-19. In addition, 1,394 people died yesterday from the disease.
In the United States, there have so far been around 20.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the pandemic. About 352,000 people have died from the disease in the United States.
Worldwide, there have been more than 85 million confirmed cases of COVID-19; while more than 1.8 million people have died from the disease.
Much hope has been placed in COVID-19 vaccines, but their rollout has not gone as planned. Health officials wanted at least 20 million people to be vaccinated at this point. But according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have only been about 4.2 million vaccinations.
The CDC says more than 13.7 million doses of the vaccine have been distributed nationwide. That’s about 7 million less than the number of COVID vaccine doses Operation Warp Speed wanted to deliver at this point.
So what’s slowing things down? Well the New York Times this morning reports three obstacles. As noted, the current COVID outbreak is increasing the burden on an already overburdened healthcare system. Additionally, many states that have the vaccines plan to get them to long-term care facilities first, which also delays distribution, depending on the times. But as Scott Gottlieb, MD, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration put it in an op-ed he wrote in the the Wall Street newspaper over the weekend: “A vaccine that sits on a shelf for weeks, waiting for its perfect recipient, does not help quell the pandemic.”
Finally, the New York Times According to reports, the holidays meant fewer staff in hospitals and other health facilities to receive and distribute vaccines.
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